Summer Time Machine Blues

Summer Time Machine Blues is a delightful teenage time-travel comedy from 2005 and a cult favourite in Japan. To members of the college Sci-Fi Club, summer means hanging around in the clubhouse with the air-con blasting. When the air-con remote is accidentally broken, the friends are forced to face the full heat of summer. The next day, after an encounter with a mysterious student, they discover an incredible new addition to their clubhouse: a working time machine. Now they can go back to before the remote broke and cool down again. If only time travel was that simple…

‘The film wears its sci-fi references on its sleeve. Back to the Future is naturally evoked, both in imitation and in the diegetic world, with the poster proudly on display outside the neighbourhood cinema… The owner of the sci-fi B movie cinema is dressed as Commander Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation, complete with a Starfleet tunic, and dishes out faulty scientific advice as gleaned from a million hokey pictures. The time machine itself is basically The Time Machine, as it appears in the 1960 George Pal film with Rod Taylor… The screenplay’s roots as a stage play are also apparent. Extensive use is made of the single clubroom location. However, there’s nothing necessarily cinematically limiting about this and Motohiro keeps the film visually interesting. The time travel sequences often visually overlap with bi-temporal split screens using the same framing.’

From a review by Adam Campbell in Midnight Eye.